Magic

Early History

Until a few centuries ago, most people lived in what they considered a magical universe, and evidence of the practice of magic is found as far back as human prehistory. Among the earliest traces of magic practice are paintings found in the European caves of the middle Paleolithic period. These belong to the last interglacial period of the Pleistocene epoch, named the Aurignacian after the cave dwellers of Aurignac (southern France), whose skeletons, artifacts, and drawings link them with the Bushmen of South Africa.

In the cave of Gargas, near Bagnères de Luchon, there are, in addition to spirited and realistic drawings of animals, numerous imprints of human hands in various stages of mutilation. Some hands were apparently first smeared with a sticky substance and then pressed onto the rock; others were held in position to be dusted around with red ocher or black pigment. Most of the imprinted hands have mutilated fingers; in some cases the first and second joints of one or more fingers are missing; in others only the stumps of all fingers remain.

A close study of the hand imprints shows that they are not those of lepers. There can be little doubt that the joints were removed for a specific purpose; on this point there is general agreement among anthropologists.

A clue to the mystery is provided by a similar custom among the Bushmen. G. W. Stow, in his book The Native Races of South Africa (1905), refers to this strange form of sacrifice. He once came into contact with a number of Bushmen who "had all lost the first joint of the little finger," which had been removed with a "stone knife" for the purpose of ensuring a safe journey to the spirit world. Another writer told of an old Bushman woman whose little fingers of both hands had been mutilated, three joints in all having been removed. She explained that each joint had been sacrificed to express her sorrow as each one of three daughters died.

In his Report on the Northwestern Tribes of the Dominion of Canada (1889), Franz Boas gives evidence of the custom among these peoples. When many deaths resulted from disease, the Canadian Indians sacrificed the joints of their little fingers in order to (they explained) "cut off the deaths."

Among the Indian Madigas (Telugu pariahs), the evil eye was averted by sacrificers who dipped their hands in the blood of goats or sheep and impressed them on either side of a house door. This custom was also known to the Brahmans of India.

Impressions of hands were also occasionally seen on the walls of Muslim mosques in India. As among the northwest Canadian tribes, the hand ceremony was most frequently practiced in India when epidemics took a heavy toll of lives. The Bushmen also removed finger joints when stricken with sickness. In Australia, where during initiation ceremonies the young Aborigine men had teeth knocked out and bodies scarred, the women of some tribes mutilated the little fingers of daughters in order to influence their future lives.

Apparently the finger-chopping customs of Paleolithic times had a magical significance. On some of the paintings in the Aurignacian caves appear symbols that suggest the slaying and butchering of animals. Other symbols are enigmatic. Of special interest are the figures of animal-headed demons, some with hands upraised in the Egyptian posture of adoration; others posed like the animal-headed dancing gods of the Bush-men.

In the Marsonlas Paleolithic cave, there are humanlike faces of angry demons with staring eyes and monstrous noses. In the Spanish Cave at Cogul, several figures of women wearing half-length skirts and shoulder shawls are represented dancing around a nude male. These females so closely resemble those of Bushman paintings that they might, if not for their location, be credited to this interesting people. Religious dances among the Bushman tribes were associated with marriage, birth, and burial ceremonies; they were also performed to exorcise demons in cases of sickness. "Dances are to us what prayers are to you," an elderly Bushman once informed a European.

Whether the cave drawings and wood, bone, and ivory carvings of the Magdalenian or late Paleolithic period at the close of the last ice age are related to magic is a question on which there is no general agreement. It is significant, however, that several carved ornaments bearing animal figures or enigmatic symbols are perforated as if worn as charms. On a piece of horn found at Lorthet, Hautes-Pyrénées, are beautiful, incised drawings of reindeer and salmon, above which appear mystical symbols.

An ape-like demon carved on bone was found at Mas d'Azil. Etched on a reindeer horn from Laugerie Basse is a prostrate man with a tail, creeping on all fours toward a grazing bison. These artifacts strengthen the theory that late Paleolithic art had its origin in magic beliefs and practices—that hunters carved on the handles of weapons and implements, or scratched on cave walls, the images of the animals they desired to capture—sometimes with the secured cooperation of demons and sometimes with the aid of magic spells.

A highly developed magic system existed in ancient Egypt, as in Babylonian (see Semites) and other early cultures. From these cultures the medieval European system of magic is believed to have evolved. Greece and Rome also possessed distinct magic systems that were integrated into their religious practice and thus, like the Egyptian and Babylonian rituals, were preserves of the priesthood.

Magic in early Europe was integral to the various religious systems that prevailed throughout that continent and survived into the Middle Ages as witchcraft. Christians regarded the practice of magic, at least the popular forms practiced in the Pagan culture competing with their religion, as foreign to the spirit of their faith. Thus the Thirty-Sixth Canon of the Ecumenical Council held at Laodicea in 364 C.E. forbade clerks and priests to become magicians, enchanters, mathematicians, or astrologers. It ordered, moreover, that the church should expel those who employed ligatures or phylacteries, because, it said, phylacteries were the prisons of the soul. The Fourth Canon of the Council of Oxia in 525 C.E. prohibited the consultation of sorcerers, augurs, and diviners, and condemned divinations made with wood or bread, while the Sixteenth Canon of the Council of Constantinople in 692 C.E. excommunicated for a period of six years diviners and those who had recourse to them. The prohibition was repeated by the Council of Rome in 721. The Forty-Second Canon of the Council of Tours in 613 said priests should teach people the inefficacy of magic to restore the health of men or animals, and later councils endorsed the church's earlier views.

Medieval Magic

It does not appear that what may be called "medieval magic" took final and definite shape until about the twelfth century. Modeled after the systems in vogue among the Byzantines and Moors of Spain, which evolved from the Alexandrian system (see Neoplatonism), what might be called "Oriental" magic gained footing in Europe and superseded the earlier magic based on paganistic practice and ritual. There is evidence that Eastern magic was imported into Europe by persons returning from the Crusades, and magic was disseminated from Constantinople throughout Europe, along with other sciences.

Witches and wizards and professors of lesser magic clung to paganism, whereas among the disciples of Oriental magic were the magicians, necromancers (fortune-tellers), and sorcerers (practitioners of malevolent magic).

The tenets of the higher branches of magic changed little from the eighth to the thirteenth century. There also appears to have been little persecution of the professors of magic. After that period, however, the opinions of the church underwent a radical change, and the life of the magus was fraught with considerable danger. Paracelsus, for instance, was not victimized in the same manner as the sorcerers and wizards, but he was consistently baited by the medical profession of his day. Agrippa was also continually persecuted, and even mystics like Jakob Boehme were imprisoned and mistreated. (Magicians were subject to persecution both for possible acts of sorcery and for allegiance to a heretical religious system.)

It is difficult to estimate the enormous popularity that magic experienced, whether for good or evil, during the Middle Ages. Although severely punished if discovered—or if its professors became notorious enough to court persecution—the power it seems to have conferred upon the practitioner was coveted by scores of people.

Two great names in the history of European magic are those of Paracelsus and Agrippa, who outlined the science of medieval magic. They were also the greatest practical magicians of the Middle Ages—apart from pure mystics, alchemists, and others—and their thaumaturgic and necromantic experiences were probably never surpassed.

Theories Regarding the Nature of Magic

According to Sir James George Frazer, author of The Golden Bough (1890), magic and religion are one and the same thing, or at least are so closely allied as to be almost identical.

Frazer's anthropologist successors in the early twentieth century, most notably Malinowski and Marcel Mauss, regarded magic as entirely distinct from religion. Magic possessed certain well-marked attributes that could be traced to mental processes differing from those from which the religious idea springs, they said. The two had become fused by the superim-position of religious rites upon magic practice.

It has also been said that religion consists of an appeal to the gods, whereas magic is the attempt to force their compliance. Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, in Greatness and Decline of the Celts (1934), argue that magic is essentially traditional. Holding that the primitive mind is markedly unoriginal, they explain magic as an art that did not exhibit frequent changes among primitive peoples, and was fixed by its own laws. Religion, they claim, was official and organized; magic, prohibited and secret.

Frazer believed all magic was based on the law of sympathy—the assumption that things act on one another at a distance because of their being secretly linked by invisible bonds. He divided sympathetic magic into homeopathic magic and contagious magic. The first is imitative or mimetic and may be practiced by itself, but the second usually necessitates the application of the imitative principle. Well-known instances of mimetic magic are the forming of wax figures in the likeness of an enemy, which are then destroyed in the hope that he will perish. This belief persisted in European witchcraft into relatively modern times. Contagious magic can be seen in the primitive warrior's anointing the weapon that caused a wound instead of the wound itself, believing that the blood on the weapon continues to feel part of the blood on the body. (See also Powder of Sympathy)

L. Marillier divided magic into three classes: the magic ofthe word or act; the magic of the human being independent of rite or formula; and the magic that demands a person of special powers and the use of ritual. A. Lehmann believed magic to be a practice of superstition, founded in illusion.

The Magic Force

Many peoples have spoken of the operation of a magic cosmic force—something that impinged upon the thought of man from outside. Many tribal cultures postulated the existence of a great reservoir of magic power, the exact nature of which they were not prepared to specify.

Certain American Indian tribes believed in a force called orenda, or spirit force. Among the ancient Peruvians everything sacred was huaca and possessed magic power. In Melanesia a force called mana, transmissible and contagious, could be seen in the form of flames or could even be heard. The Malays used the word kramat to signify the same thing, and the Malagasy used the term hasma. Some tribes around Lake Tanganyika believed in such a force, which they called ngai, and Australian tribes had similar terms, such as churinga and boolya. In Mexico there was a strange creed named nagualism that held the same concept—everything nagual was magic or possessed an inherent spiritual force of its own.

The Dynamics of Magic

Earlier practitioners of magic believed that it is governed by a few well-defined laws. Chief among these is that of sympathy, which can be subdivided into the laws of similarity, antipathy, and contiguity.

The law of similarity and homeopathy is divisible into two tenets: (1) the assumption that like produces like—an illustration of which is the destruction of a doll in the form of an enemy; and (2) the idea that like cures like—for instance, that the stone called bloodstone can staunch the flow of blood.

The law dealing with antipathy rests on the assumption that the application of a certain object or drug expels its contrary.

The idea of contiguity assumes that whatever has once formed part of an object continues to form part of it. Thus, if a magician can obtain a portion of a person's hair, he can work harm upon that person through the invisible bonds that are believed to extend between the individual and the hair in the magician's possession. It was commonly believed that if the animal familiar of a witch is wounded, the wound will manifest on the witch herself (see werewolf). This is called "repercussion."

It was also widely assumed that if the magician procures the name of a person he can gain dominion over that person. This arose from the idea that the name of an individual is the same as the person himself. The doctrine of the "incommunicable name," the hidden name of the god or magician, has many examples in Egyptian legend, usually the deity taking extraordinary care to keep his name secret so that no one might gain power over him. The spell or incantation is connected with this concept.

Associated with these, to a lesser degree, is magic gesture, usually introduced for the purpose of accentuating the spoken word. Gesture is often symbolic or sympathetic; it is sometimes the reversal of a religious rite, such as marching against the sun, which is known as walking "widdershins." The method of pronouncing rites is also of great importance. Archaic or foreign expressions are usually found in spells both ancient and modern, and the tone in which the incantation is spoken is no less important than its exactness. Rhythm is often employed to aid memory. (See also Mantra)

The Magician

In early society the magic practitioner, a term that includes the shaman, medicine man, piagé, and witch doctor, held his or her position by hereditary right; by an accident of birth, like being the seventh son of a seventh son; through revelation from the gods; or through his mastery of ritual.

The shaman operated like a medium, for instead of summoning the powers of the air at his bidding, as did the magicians of medieval days, he found it necessary to throw himself into a trance and seek them in their own sphere. (The magician is also often regarded as possessed by an animal or supernatural being.)

The duties of the priest and magician were often combined in tribal society. When one religion was superseded, however, the priests of the old cult were considered, in the eyes of the leaders and believers of the new, nothing but evil or misguided magicians.

Medieval Definition of Magic

The definitions of magic given by the great magicians of medieval and modern times naturally differ greatly from those of anthropologists. For example, nineteenth-century magician Éliphas Lévi states in his History of Magic (1913):

"Magic, therefore, combines in a single science that which is most certain in philosophy which is eternal and infallible in religion. It reconciles perfectly and incontestably those two terms so opposed on the first view—faith and reason, science and belief, authority and liberty. It furnishes the human mind with an instrument of philosophical and religious certainty were as exact as mathematics, and even accounting for the infallibility of mathematics themselves…. There is an incontest able truth; there is an infallible method of knowing that truth; while those who attain this knowledge and adopt it as a rule of life, can endow their life with a sovereign power which can make them masters of all inferior things, all wandering spirits, or, in other words, arbiters and kings of the world."

Paracelsus, writing in the sixteenth century, stated:

"The magical is a great hidden wisdom, and reason is a great open folly. No armour shields against magic for it strikes at the inward spirit of life. Of this we may rest assured, that through full and powerful imagination only can we bring the spirit of any man into an image. No conjuration, no rites are needful; circle-making and the scattering of incense are mere humbug and jugglery. The human spirit is so great a thing that no man can express it; eternal and unchangeable as God Himself is the mind of man; and could we rightly comprehend the mind of man, nothing would be impossible to us upon the earth. Through faith the imagination is invigorated and completed, for it really happens that every doubt mars its perfection. Faith must strengthen imagination, for faith establishes the will. Because man did not perfectly believe and imagine, the result is that arts are uncertain when they might be wholly certain."

Agrippa also regarded magic as the true road to communion with God, thus linking it with mysticism.

Later Magic

With the death of Agrippa in 1535, the old school of magicians ended. But the traditions of magic were handed down to others who were equally capable of preserving them, or were later revived by persons interested in the art. There was a great distinction between those practitioners of magic whose minds were illuminated by a high mystical ideal and those persons of doubtful occult position, like the Comte de Saint Germain and others.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century there were many great alchemists in practice who were also devoted to research on transcendental magic, which they carefully and successfully concealed under the veil of hermetic investigation. These included Michael Maier, Robert Fludd, Cosmopolite, Jean D'Espagnet, Samuel Norton (see Thomas Norton),Baron de Beausoleil, J. Van Helmont, and Eirenaeus Philalethes (see also alchemy).The eighteenth century was rich in occult personalities, for example, the alchemists Lascaris Martines de Pasqually and Louis Claude de Saint-Martin, who founded the Martinist school, which was continued by "Papus" (Gérard Encausse).

By the end of the eighteenth century, magic practice had reached its lowest ebb as emphasis on the exploration of causative agents centered on the physical world and supernatural explanations were pushed aside. It was not until the nineteenth century that a spreading mesmerist philosophy offered philosophical underpinnings for a scientific worldview. Magic merged for the moment with mesmerism, and many of the secret magic societies that abounded in Europe about this period practiced animal magnetism experiments as well as astrology, Kabbalism, and ceremonial magic.

Mesmerism powerfully influenced mystic life in the time of its chief advocates, and the mesmerists of the first era were in direct line with the Martinists and the mystical magicians of the late eighteenth century. Indeed mysticism and magnetism were one and the same thing to some of these occultists (see Secret Tradition), the most celebrated of which were Cazotte, Ganneau, Comte, Wronski, Baron Du Potet de Sennevoy, Hennequin, Comte d'Ourches, Baron de Guldenstubbé, and Éliphas Lévi.

Modern Revivals of Magic

During the 1890s there was a revival of interest in ritual magic in Europe among both intellectuals and traditional occultists. This "occult underground" permeated much of the intellectual life and progressive movements in Europe, in contrast to the more popular preoccupation with Spiritualism and table turning.

Symbolic of this magic revival was the founding of the famous Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which numbered among its members such individuals as Annie Horniman (sponsor of the Abbey Theatre, Dublin), Florence Farr (mis-tress of George Bernard Shaw), S. L. MacGregor Mathers, William Butler Yeats, Arthur Machen, and Arthur Edward Waite. Another famous member was the magician Aleister Crowley, who left the order to found his own organization, A [.therefore] A [.therefore] , and then become head of the German-based Ordo Templi Orientis. Crowley's more psychologically sophisticated presentation of magic came to dominate twentieth-century thought on magic, even among those who rejected various portions of it, such as its emphasis on sex, mind-altering drugs, and egocentricity. A more sinister aspect of magic was the current of occult thought that flowed into and undergirded Adolf Hitler and Nazism.

During the 1930s there was an outbreak of public interest in the occult in Britain and Europe, and a number of significant books on magic were published. Their influence was limited only by the relatively smaller influence of mass media at that time and by the conservatism of intellectual life. Exceptional individuals like Aleister Crowley flourished in the 1920s and 1930s, but were deplored by polite society, which regarded such occultists as scandalous misfits.

A second wave of popular occultism flared up in the 1950s in Britain and North America, fueled largely by reprints of key books published during the 1930s. This modern interest in magic, however, had little in common with the outlook and ideals of medieval magicians and followers of the hermetic art. It stemmed largely from the trendiness of postwar affluence and the desire for sensationalist indulgence. The occult explosion led in the 1960s to Satanism and black magic cults. Much of modern occultism has been influenced by the use of mind-altering drugs.

During this modern period, one long-kept secret of occultism became generally discussed—that of the importance of sexual energy in dynamizing the processes of magic. Although this factor was well known to some occultists in Persia, China, and India, it was rediscovered in the early twentieth century and increasingly and openly discussed in the writings of Aleister Crowley and his disciples.

Throughout this century practitioners of magic have made some extraordinary claims about achieving desired ends. There are still two opinions among occultists as to how such feats are achieved. One is that desired effects in the physical world are produced through the operator's willpower, assisted by various ritual practices. The other opinion, still held by a minority, is that desired effects are achieved by means of spirit entities evoked during rituals. (Among skeptics there are various mundane explanations for the seemingly positive results of magic activity.)

Conjuring Tricks and Stage Magic

Today the term magic normally denotes the performance of conjuring, legerdemain, or illusion, although the term conjuring was originally used to indicate the evocation of spirits. Conjuring tricks have been used by priests for thousands of years to create the illusion of miracles. The astonishing and skillful illusions of modern stage magicians show that special caution is necessary in evaluating many apparently paranormal feats of magic, and stage magicians have also performed a valuable service in exposing fraudulent "psychic" feats. Because of their history of exposing fraud and their knowledge of the many techniques for creating illusions, stage magicians tend to be skeptical of all claimed paranormal feats.

Sources:

Agrippa, Henry Cornelius. The Philosophy of Natural Magic. London, 1651. Reprint, New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1974.

Barrett, Francis. The Magus: A Complete System of Occult Philosophy. London, 1801. Reprint, New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1967.

Bonewits, Philip E. I. Real Magic. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1971. Reprint, New York: Berkeley, 1971.

Christian, Paul. The History and Practice of Magic. 2 vols. London: Forge Press, 1952.

Christopher, Milbourne. The Illustrated History of Magic. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1973. Reprint, London: Robert Hale, 1975.

——. Panorama of Magic. New York: Dover, 1962.

Crow, W. B. A History of Magic, Witchcraft & Occultism. London: Aquarian Press, 1968. Reprint, London: Abacus, 1972.

[Crowley, Aleister] The Master Therion. Magick in Theory and Practice. Paris, 1929. Reprint, New York: Castle Books, n.d. Rev. ed. Magick. Edited by John Symonds and Kenneth Grant. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973. Reprint, New York: Samuel Weiser, 1974.

Ennemoser, Joseph. The History of Magic. 2 vols. London, 1854. Reprint, New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1970.

Freedland, Nat. The Occult Explosion. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1972. Reprint, London: Michael Joseph, 1972.

King, Francis. Ritual Magic in England (1887 to the Present Day). London: Neville Spearman, 1970. Reprint, New York: Macmillan, 1971.

——. Sexuality, Magic & Perversion. London: Neville Spearman, 1971. Reprint, New York: Citadel Press, 1972.

Lévi, Éliphas. The History of Magic. London: Rider, 1913. Reprint, New York: David McKay, 1914.

——. The Mysteries of Magic: A Digest of Éliphas Lévi. Edited by A. E. Waite. London, 1886. Reprint, New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1974.

——. Transcendental Magic. London, 1896. Rev. ed. London: Rider, 1923.

Melton, J. Gordon, and Isotta Poggi. Magic, Witchcraft, and Paganism in America: A Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1992.

O'Keefe, Daniel Lawrence. Stolen Lightning: The Social Theory of Magic. New York: Continuum, 1982.

Seligmann, Kurt. The History of Magic. New York: Pantheon Books, 1948. Reprinted as Magic, Supernaturalism, and Religion. 1971.

Shah, Sayed Idries. Oriental Magic. London: Rider, 1956.

——. The Secret Lore of Magic: The Books of the Sorcerers. London: Frederick Muller, 1957.

Summers, Montague. Witchcraft and Black Magic. London: Rider, 1946. Reprint, New York: Causeway, 1974.

Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1971.

Thompson, C. J. S. The Mysteries and Secrets of Magic. London, 1927. Reprint, New York: Causeway, 1973.

Waite, Arthur Edward. The Book of Ceremonial Magic. London, 1911. Reprint, New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1961.

Webb, James. The Flight from Reason. London: Macdonald, 1971. Reprinted as The Occult Underground. LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1974.

——. The Occult Establishment. LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1975.